Monday, January 24, 2011

Links

Almost true tales of academia: "A friend from undergrad was in a program where she was the only female student to make it out alive and with a PhD in a decade. ('You’re making it sound worse than it is,' my husband tells me. 'Only one student actually died, and she was killed by a drunk driver.' 'Yes, but the drunk driver was the department chair.')"

Hitting very close to home: Dating as a 30-something female academic: "Most of the time, dating does not feel like fun. I mean, sure, it’s supposed to feel like fun, but really what it feels more like is a job interview, a job interview in which you are both the interviewer as well as the interviewee."

Universities as transmitters of social capital: "Once upon a time, the content of an elite education was much more closely mapped to the cultural capital of the elite: this is precisely what fed the resentment of ambitious outsiders like Richard Nixon for the Eastern Establishment."

And, nothing to do with academia at all: "Wild coyotes have settled in or around every major city in the United States, thriving as never before, and in New York they have taken to golf. I’m told the New Yorker coyotes spend a good deal of time near the tenth hole on the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx." Yup, golfing coyotes.